Decades later, thousands of sunsets and endless versions of the same story, nothing has changed in Kenya.

Especially on the coast, where the tides bring and take away the same old scripts like worn-out shells.

‘She's different from all the others,’ continues the European pensioner with a sunburnt smile and his shirt open over his white chest.

And he still says it with conviction, even now that, with gender equality and illusions, he too is finally different from all the others.

In fact, let's say it: he's the same as all the others who think they're different from us.

And that's fine. Or at least, let's pretend it is.

The “hard core” of the coast — strictly male, and yes, also hard, in the absence of the little blue pill — continues to repeat the magic formula that justifies every intercontinental love at first sight.

The scene is always the same: a baby pensioner with a blissful look and his brain cells on permanent holiday, hand in hand with a curvaceous twenty-year-old from Nairobi.

He smiles like someone who has won the lottery, she smiles like someone who has finally found the right ticket.

And right on cue, between a beer and a plate of calamari, comes the ritual phrase:

'She's different from all the others.

Yes, but from whom?

The phrase itself is already a defensive manifesto, a half-admission.

It's like saying, 'Yes, I know how it works here, but this time it's different.

So, instead of laughing behind the back of the new Romeo of Watamu, let's try to understand.

Because love, or what remains of it, is always a serious matter.

‘She's not the usual beach party fling,’ he explains, puffing out his chest like an excited turkey.

‘Oh no?’

‘No, I met Jasmine at the bank.’

‘At the bank?’

‘Yes. She was sending money to her sister to pay for her niece's studies.’

‘What a noble soul.’

‘Yeah! And just think, she was working for a Swiss guy as an accountant, but that pig was hitting on her and she had to quit.’

‘How unfortunate.’

‘Yeah, but then she met me. And I met her. We live together and we might get married.’

Here we have the tropical fairy tale, Kenyan coast version.

He, a widower or divorcee, with a pension sufficient to survive in Europe but regal in Africa.

She, beautiful, poor and with a natural talent for recognising the scent of Old Spice deodorant as a sign of destiny.

In short, an encounter between two lonely souls who have stopped believing in dreams but not in opportunities.

Behind Jasmine is the story of too many girls born with beauty as their only weapon, raised in homes where childhood ends too soon and the father is often the first enemy.

At eighteen, they flee to the sea, six hundred kilometres of hope, and reinvent themselves.

Nothing new, nothing scandalous: it is the unauthorised biography of the world.

Even in Italy, showgirls weren't born on trees, and many respectable ladies have climbed the social ladder by clinging to a wallet.

Except that in Malindi, the sand is finer and the moralists are more tanned.

Jasmine, at least, did not get lost in the labyrinths of the night.

She did not surrender to rum and the lewdness of the beach boys.

She chose a more straightforward path: to find a stable man, preferably white, preferably solvent, preferably in love.

And after all, why blame her?

Between a rented room with a shared bathroom and a house with real bathroom fixtures, the choice is not so philosophical.

As for him — our Mediterranean lover in voluntary exile — he needs her too.

Perhaps to heal a heart bruised by divorce, perhaps to rediscover the youth that has remained stuck in 1978, or perhaps just to feel desired again.

And Jasmine makes him believe it perfectly, with the grace of someone who has understood that love, sometimes, is just a language to be learned quickly.

‘You can't understand,’ he tells his friends at the bar, ‘I feel like a kid again.’

Viagra does the rest.

The truth is that she is no different from all the others.

She is simply wiser, more pragmatic, more trained in survival.

She knows how to smile even when she is thinking about something else.

She knows that her partner will have a pension book and a maturing account, but also that for a few years he can give her a house with a television, a car, and maybe the chance to send money to that famous granddaughter.

And he, all things considered, is not even a monster.

He is just a man who has found a little affection where life is cheaper and time passes more slowly.

Sometimes she deludes herself, sometimes she really believes it.

And us?

We are here, every season, telling ourselves the same story as if it were new, as if we didn't already know the ending.

Because in the end, more than her or him, it is the world that is never different from any other.

Only warmer, more ironic, and with a view of the ocean.